The subject invention relates to a synthetic aperture radar correlator that allows high resolution processing of synthetic aperture radar data using the image capabilities of the full azimuth and doppler bandwidth without the clutter noise degradation.
Clutter or speckle has been long known to limit the working resolution of images obtained with coherent radiation. Images obtained by synthetic aperture radar systems suffer from the same drawback and it has, therefore, been of considerable interest to explore various techniques for the reduction of the radar speckle in these images. The conventional technique of achieving incoherent averaging of the radar speckle, which involves adding images obtained from different sections of the radar bandwidth, has the disadvantage of a limited number of possible looks due to the loss of resolution associated with the narrower doppler bandwidth used for each independent look.